The Mortal Word – Genevieve Cogman

Five books in, the “Invisible Library” series is still fun to read.

The Invisible Library is attached to a multiverse of parallel worlds - worlds that are recognizable as variants of our own, but lie on a continuum from Order to Chaos. Order is dominated by dragons, Chaos is dominated by the Fae, and the Library tries to keep the competition from doing too much damage.

The Fae are not chaotic in the sense of being random or arbitrary. Rather, they all strive to be the stars of their own narratives. In “The Mortal Word”, for example, the two main delegates to the peace conference are the Cardinal and the Princess. The Cardinal is Richelieu without the bother of ruling France - a plotter for the sake of being enmeshed in plots. The Princess is the epitome of the good fairy-tale princess. (If she walks into the woods, expect the birds to start singing.) They also do magic.

The dragons are orderly in the sense that they have clear rules and clear hierarchies. (They are not orderly in the sense that they obey all the rules, but in the sense that it is extremely important not to get caught.) They also do magic, largely elemental.

The Invisible Library is a mostly-neutral third party that tries to limit the damage. The way it does this is rather charming: It can stabilize a world by keeping books that are unique to that world. (The Library tends to send junior librarians out to steal those books.) For example, thousands of worlds may have “Gulliver’s Travels”, but one world might be the only one in which Gulliver causes Laputa to crash. Librarians also do magic, of a specialized and language-oriented kind.

There are good stories to be told in this milieu, and Cogman’s novels have been good. In “The Mortal World” a peace conference between Dragons and Fae - mediated by the Library - is unsettled by the murder of one of the Dragons. Irene - a junior librarian, and the main character in all the books - and Veil - his world’s equivalent of Sherlock Holmes - have been called in to investigate the murder. It won’t be pretty for anyone if the murder causes the conference to fail. Except perhaps for the apparently-large number of participants who have their own opinions about what they’d like the investigators to conclude.

“The Mortal Word” was not as much fun as some of the earlier books in the series, as there is no longer the sense that this universe is getting larger as we become better acquainted with it. Still fun to read, and I look forward to book 6.